With the introduction of LTE and wide availability of mobile broadband, there is significant growth in mobile services and applications. These new mobile services and applications pose huge challenges and opportunities to mobile operators in terms of providing network management (such as Quality of Service (QoS)) and control. Traditionally, mobile core network control is achieved by a policy control and charging (PCC) mechanism which is based on Internet Protocol (IP) flow at the network layer. However, most of the mobile services such as Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) need to be managed at the application level and these mobile services are mostly transactional and session based. In addition, the time sensitive nature of these transactional services requires a very low latency management solution. The traditional flow based service control does not manage the session based service well.
In addition, multiple ecosystems currently exist to support a diverse array of mobile applications. However, these ecosystems have poor or no interactions with each other. Given the dynamic nature of the mobile environment, it is difficult for these ecosystems to adapt to current conditions experienced by the mobile applications. This can lead to mobile applications not performing well when resources are not correctly allocated to meet the needs of the mobile application, particularly in real time, delay sensitive applications.